IVAC Blog

Dr. Samba Sow is Director General of the Center for Vaccine Development – Mali (CVD Mali) and a Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. This blog is cross-posted from Lancet Global Health.

Scientific research, by definition, is about process. Scientists must follow carefully developed guidelines and established protocols to make sure research is conducted validly, accurately, and ethically. As any field researcher knows, meticulous attention to detail is challenging at the best of times, when obstacles like staff turnover, equipment shortages or delays, power outages, strikes, security concerns, and disruptive rumours are not out of the ordinary. But these “everyday” logistical challenges of doing research are further compounded when political instability surrounds your research site.

In the past year, my colleagues and I at Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) Mali faced immeasurable challenges in keeping research efforts going when the insurgency that has afflicted our country for decades began moving southward and threatening the capital city of Bamako, where our research centre is located. Read the full blog at the Lancet Global Health.

While the political turmoil and violence in Mali occupied headlines earlier this year, we here at IVAC were acutely aware of the situation as we worried daily about our partners there, including Dr. Samba Sow and his team at Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) in Bamako, who lead the Mali site of our Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health (PERCH) project. Earlier this month, our team had a chance to return to Mali, now that the situation in the capital has stabilized. We were impressed at CVD’s ability to keep the PERCH project – not to mention their work on the Global Enterics Multi-center Study (GEMS), MenAfriVac, and a few other randomized vaccine trials – up and running during the crisis, and to make the right choices to safely balance the security of their staff and care for patients while maintaining the integrity of the research. The trip got me reflecting on the broader efforts around pneumonia prevention, and three things struck me as worth sharing.

Kate O'Brien with members of IVAC's PERCH team and CVD-Mali in Bamako.

First,in spite of the progress on PCV,our work is not done on squelching the burden of pneumonia and the problem is not being fully met with the resources needed to tackle it. Much time and many resources are being allocated to global mortality estimates, including for pneumonia, and there is evidence that this burden of mortality has fallen meaningfully over the past decade. Credible disease burden efforts have an important place in the global health landscape and deserve to be done, and done properly, but they are, and will always be, a monitoring and planning tool. They only reflect the progress; they are not the progress itself. These estimates are fully dependent on sound, high-quality fieldwork on pneumonia burden, and the consequent efforts and research on protection, prevention, and treatment of pneumonia. There is too little funding for strategic fieldwork on pneumonia. Being in Bamako, in the hospital, in the clinic, and most importantly visiting communities and households of families who are affected by pneumonia, reminded me that this is where progress is made and this is where we must invest and innovate.

Second, we have to focus on what will meaningfully make changes in the burden of and mortality from pneumonia. We still don’t have tools that can readily differentiate the children with true pneumonia from those with other lower respiratory diseases that require a different treatment. Families still don’t have the basic understanding of signs of respiratory disease for which they should readily seek care. And hospitals and clinics remain crowded, under-resourced, and fragile with treatment approaches that too often are unable to support children through their illness. This is why children die from pneumonia, still.

CVD-Mali staff demonstrate procedures as Kate O'Brien and other PERCH team members observe.

Third, there are field research sites that have built expertise, infrastructure, and experience to tackle the important unknowns, but they are fragile and will not remain unless investments are made. In spite of the constraints, there is research of the highest quality ongoing in places where child mortality from pneumonia is highest, including in Mali. It is outstanding how the CVD-Mali team managed to keep all of its critical research projects up and running not only through the day-to-day challenges, but also through the political challenges of this past year. It was a great honor to learn from them, to work on solving challenges at the site, and to renew our understanding of where focus and effort is needed to make reductions of pneumonia and diarrhea a reality on the ground, and not just in our computer algorithms and spreadsheets.

Kate O’Brien, MD, MPH, is Acting Executive Director of IVAC. A pediatric infectious disease physician, epidemiologist, and vaccinologist, she previously served as Deputy Director of IVAC. She also serves as Associate Director of the Center for American Indian Health.